I Am Such A Fuck

Wherein I prove myself to myself

Envision your humble correspondent, trapped in the rocks of his own inadequacies. Small rocks, broken into piecemeal amalgams (time had forced its cruel hand—a test of patience, to say the least) though no less constricting than concrete. It was time. I was to free myself, to embark on a journey of self-discovery, designed to prove myself to an audience of one.

Status quo: I’ve been in a hole; let me fill you in.

I escaped; birthed anew. But what is new life, if not another blip in the passage of emptiness? What is it to arrive, but to take a step closer to another departure? Where does it begin? To prove myself I had to solve these mysteries; defeat the paradoxical muse so long the bane of your humble philosopher, untrained and uneducated in all but his own thoughts. I had embarked on a journey to the very origins of being, existential essence, the here and the now and the always and everything in between. Desperately I searched for the alpha, the beginning, the champion of the creator-created discourse.

The chicken or the egg? Wherein I pursue the beginnings of life and settle upon the egg.

Alas: of all people, I should know: ingredients maketh not the meal nor the man. I have bones and skin and a heart which beats, but to what does this translate? Duly do I savage the palette of the world, with no more grace than that oesophagealist egg, traversing a descent not dissimilar to my own.

I hoped. Hope is the search for the street light’s flitting eye, gazing through the curtains that blow in the soft zephyrs of night time intuition.To speak of hope is to eulogise; to lament the death of that which was never really there in the first place. As the new day dawned the sun rose again, as it had on every other day that I had been present to witness.The stoic repetition, the calculated dependability, the blazing self-assuredness; it was all chapters of the same book. How could I write my own passage, pen the narrative of change which had thus far eluded me? How would I dull the embers of resentment, put out the fires of self-doubt?

Homeopathy will save us; wherein I attempt to drink a waterfall dry to dilute the demons.

I had become bloated in ennui. I had paraphrased my very being, diluting the essence of everything I have ever hoped to be; through pursuing impossible homeopathy, the cheap mimicry of my elusive ‘self ’.The science of millionths had failed me. If only I could deflect this self-imposed agenda of destabilisation, my very own motion of no confidence moved and seconded in meus sponte. I was already 70 per cent water, had that not been enough? It was then I realised; this saturation had been the problem. I had to become the duck’s back to the waters of my own self-doubt.

‘Tis the season; wherein I pursue a duck to learn its ways, and become the duck.

Was I peaking too soon? To those ends, my cynicism became my folly: with thick black paint I decorated my fragile canvas, that curious subset of the id which feigned optimism without invitation nor merit. If you look at the darkness in the eyes of a sparrow, it may serve to remind you that the pupil is just a hole; the absence of light—a window not to the soul, but to nothing. But I digress; perhaps my eyes would be so dark, were I to exist in a tree.To know the mind of a sparrow was the clear way forward.

Wherein I shed the fabrics of my disillusionment and embrace my inner avian.

The sparrows flew, startled starlings. I cried into the air, my utterances more hollow than whatever it was that had so briefly masqueraded as my hopes.The flutter of feathers blanketed my psyche, a thin duvet of consolation which did nothing to soothe the fretful slumber of doubt that followed that eve. I arose, unrested, from a dream which hadn’t quite died yet.

The next day I sat tenderly reconciling my feelings, content with insouciance. It was only through absolving myself of my own guilt that I found valiance. In my valiance, I found courage; in my courage, solace; in my solace, an overwhelmingly bright and open sky; a sky of opportunity bounded only by the horizons of my inhibitions. In that moment I looked truth in the eye, I knew what it was which was calling me.The brightness beckoned.

The ultimate Blue Zone: wherein I attempt to summit the Rankine Brown library and touch the sky.

“There is no door whose lock can be forced by valour alone,” I consoled myself. I will continue.

The light shone through my curtains, dancing across my face, teasing my lips with its kiss. It wrote the song of the lost across my wall, the autobiography of the forgotten, an ode to a life I hadn’t occupied since my shining youth. I realised the calling, the yearning, the other- halfness that I could nearly touch. I had to go towards the light.

The final cliche; wherein I hastily conclude by ‘going towards the light’.

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